The expansive catalogue of recent books on global urbanization covers an array of approaches, from the political and social to the technological and environmental. Urbanization and its central object, the city, claim a priority in analyses of the modern condition, whether optimistic or pessimistic. The city also appears as a central protagonist in any number of works of architectural history, having captivated the attention of architects and architectural discourse for the past two centuries. In Designing the Modern City: Urbanism since 1850, Eric Mumford aims to acknowledge both of these views—the city as the conceit of architects and the city as the embodiment of modernity—with a broad survey of the strategies conceived, proposed, and deployed to design the modern city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Although compact, Mumford's book accomplishes ample coverage of salient examples distributed temporally and geographically, such that it functions as a survey textbook, one that may occupy the pedagogical positions formerly held by classic publications on city form. The influential morphological approach of publications by Leonardo Benevolo, Edmund Bacon, and Spiro Kostof has of course waned in recent decades with the ascendance of more emphatically sociocultural and technopolitical examinations of urbanization, leaving open the question of whether and how we should talk about the intentional design of cities. This is the challenge that Mumford takes up, proposing to offer “an account of how key figures in design responded to changing social, technical, and economic circumstances with design proposals and built projects” (2). The urbanism of the book's subtitle is for Mumford a field …